LSEG axes Financial Times subscriptions amid FTSE coverage retreat
The operator of the London Stock Exchange has cancelled hundreds of corporate subscriptions to the Financial Times, CityAM understands, in a move that could end a decades-long relationship between the two City institutions.
LSEG is understood to have taken the decision in response to the paper’s gradual retreat from coverage of the London markets, with more resources at the paper instead ploughed into politics and international reporting.
The group declined to comment on the move or the rationale behind the decision. The Financial Times did not respond to a request for comment.
Since it was founded as the London Financial Guide in 1888, coverage of the London stock market has been the mainstay of the Square Mile-based Financial Times, from which London’s FTSE 100 index derives its name.
But in recent years, the pink-coloured broadsheet has pared back its reporting on the capital’s listed businesses in favour of a greater focus on overseas markets as well as increased reporting on politics.
FTSE out of focus
A CityAM analysis of Financial Times reporting suggests the frequency of the paper’s coverage of large cap London-listed businesses has fallen by as much as 70 per cent since 2010.
Barclays bank, for example, was featured more than 2,000 times a year in FT reporting before 2015, after which mentions of the lender have since tumbled, falling below 750 in 2025. Mentions of BP have fallen from 1,900 in 2010 to 384 in 2025, while mentions of Tesco have slumped from nearly 1,000 in 2014 to just 144 in 2025.
Meanwhile, political coverage has been ramped up, with the terms “Labour Party” and “Conservative Party” together appearing almost twice as frequently during the 2024 election year as compared to 2010, and Reform leader Nigel Farage mentioned more times in 2025 than during the 2016 Brexit referendum year.
“The quality of the political coverage at the FT has never been better and more pertinent… but its corporate coverage has never been weaker, particularly in London,” the communications chief of one FTSE 100 company told CityAM.
“Senior editors increasingly seem more comfortable speaking at Davos than they do talking to the City.”
A long-serving former Financial Times journalist told CityAM: “A sustained retreat from daily coverage of global asset markets at the FT has left its core City readership having to look elsewhere, in print and online.
“Occasional analysis pieces are all well and good, but the everyday habit-forming price stories are absent, and much-missed, as the LSE itself shows with this landmark move, which once would have been unthinkable.”